I just noticed a subtle and really funny Google joke. Look at where on the search results page it tells you how long the search took. They’re screwing around with the units of time (and in some cases substituting actual measures of speed). So far I’ve noticed figures in units of:

Centibeats

Microfortnights

Microweeks

Nanocenturies

“The velocity of an unladen swallow”

Planck times

Shakes of a lamb’s tail

Warp (Star Trek, of course)

Centons (Battlestar Galactica)

Parsecs (a unit of time in Star Wars Episode IV )

Jiffies

Skidoo (23.00 skidoo, to be precise)

Gigawatts (pretty hard to explain how that’s a unit of time or velocity)

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

I forget how I got the URL, but something called the Chatbot Game purports to be a combination of Eliza and Digg. That is, it’s a chatbot with a lot of rules; anybody can submit rules; rules are voted up and down.

I don’t think I’ll want to play with it for a while (I’m heading off on vacation for a while), so I thought I’d post it here to see if anybody else had any thoughts about or familiarity with it.